It’s been a year since Grace Potter last performed in her home state of Vermont, at her annual Grand Point North festival.

As she prepares for the latest edition of the two-day bash this weekend in Burlington, the Southern California resident returns to the stage as a woman living a much different life than the one she had when a pregnant Grace Potter walked off that stage in Waterfront Park last September.

In December she married Eric Valentine, who produced her most-recent album, 2015’s “Midnight.” In January she gave birth to her first child, Sagan Valentine, whose first name inspired by famed astronomer Carl Sagan reflects Potter’s fascination with space, as everything from her signature ballad “Stars” to her self-described “Star Trek nerd” persona indicate.

Those changes followed tumultuous years including the dissolution of her original band, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, her divorce from Nocturnals drummer Matt Burr and months spent avoiding music and wondering if she had a future in the business. Now the Waitsfield native is working on new music that she said taps back into that soulful vibe she started with 15 years ago.

Potter, 35, spoke about all those changes Friday while enjoying a salad and margherita pizza at Barnyard Wood Crafted Pizza in South Burlington. Here are highlights of her interview with the Burlington Free Press:

Grace Potter's life has changed drastically since her last Grand Point North festival with her marriage to record producer Eric Valentine and the birth of their son, Sagan.(Photo11: COURTESY)

On motherhood

Burlington Free Press: How has the baby changed things for you?

Grace Potter: It just makes me wanna be good, all day. All I want to do is be good for him. Like, not be good because it’s a performance or what I want him to perceive me to be but because I know now who I am and I see who he’s becoming. I watch his personality emerge. It makes me proud to sing for him. I love singing for him, whereas when I was a kid there was like this weird pull, like my parents or uncles or aunts would go, “Come on, Gracie, sing the song that everybody loves, come on! Will you sit down and play that one song?”

BFP: People still do that.

GP: And there’s this part of me that’s still like a 12-year-old kid that’s like, “Noooo.” But with Sagan it just falls out of my mouth, because it’s the best, it’s the thing I’m the best at. And I want that for him. I want him to experience and hear music being woven into his vocabulary.

BFP: And if you’re doing it with a sense of joy for him, does that translate to you singing for a crowd of 3,000 people?

Grace Potter plays during day 2 of the Grand Point North music festival at Waterfront Park on Sunday afternoon September 17, 2017 in Burlington.(Photo11: BRIAN JENKINS/for the FREE PRESS)

GP: Totally, totally. And knowing that he’s out there watching is a big part of it. Eric will strap him on in the little Ergo carrier we have and Eric will go listen at the front of house with our sound guy and, you know, one of the world’s greatest record producers listening to your show will already make you want to play a better show (laughs) when you’ve got that finely-tuned set of ears on it. And then Sagan, you know, when I can see him out there, it’s totally mind-blowingly exciting for me. I don’t have to think. When I’m on stage there’s not a whole lotta thinking -- in fact, if I think too hard I’ll forget the lyrics. So it’s a feeling that I have of just like, “Oh, this is a complete life, this is what life is supposed to be.”

On returning to music

BFP: We talked a little bit last year about how you had put music away for months, you did a little bit of tinkering on the piano and started getting back into it.

GP: It was on the back burner.

BFP: Because you didn’t really want to do music.

Grace Potter and Phish members Mike Gordon and Trey Anastasio performed together in 2017 at Potter's Grand Point North festival at Waterfront Park in Burlington.(Photo11: BRIAN JENKINS/for the FREE PRESS)

GP: I think I was angry at music, because it really (expletive) up my life. I blamed the fact that I had an inherent talent that suddenly made me feel like I am a slave, like I owed it to the world to keep making music and I just kind of had to do it.

I created opportunities, but my voice and what I had to offer the world was something special, and a lot of people around me that I cared about wanted that to continue and happen as much as possible and as often as possible without stopping. And that push and that energy and that momentum kind of swept me up in it in a way that I felt like music and my talent and the skill set that I had was driving my life. I wasn’t driving my life. Because I’m not my talent. It’s something that I can do, it’s a really cool magic trick that I have where I shut my eyes, I go on stage and something special happens. If I had any idea what the (expletive) it was I probably would lose it. I don’t know what it is, but it’s there. I think that made it hard for me occasionally to kind of understand the difference.

I just got mad at it. I blamed music because, why else did everything fall apart? The stakes got too high. When you have something special to offer the world people get excited, and they want as much of it as possible, and they want to share it and that’s really, really good, until it isn’t really, really good, and until it’s hurting people and people are feeling left out or underappreciated or left behind, and that pain, like, it’s not why I got into music.

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Grace Potter performs during day two of the Grand Point North music festival on Saturday September 18, 2016 on the waterfront in Burlington.(Photo11: BRIAN JENKINS/FREE PRESS FILE)

I didn’t want to hurt people, but when the stakes are that high, like, I guess I just didn’t even think about it. I didn’t think about the fact that that might be hard for people, especially as people were coming and going from my orbit it was easier to blame music than it was for me to blame myself. It was like, “Well, I didn’t ask to be born singing, I didn’t ask for this and maybe I would be better if I had just stuck with house painting.” But I didn’t, and now I’m at peace with that. I’m happy with music again. That needed to happen, I needed to go through my war.

Grace Potter, shown performing at Waterfront Park in 2016, headlines two shows this weekend at her annual Grand Point North festival.(Photo11: BRIAN JENKINS/for the FREE PRESS)

On her evolving musical style

BFP: Because you’re not with Hollywood (Records, owned by Disney), in terms of new music and all of that, where do you see things heading right now?

GP: I have been meeting with labels so there’s a lot of interest and it’s very focused interest. It’s like, only places that would know what to do with me, because I just spent 10 years on a label that had no idea what to do with me (laughs). But that was kind of the fun of it. That was part of why I loved being on Hollywood Records.

BFP: You were a little bit of the oddball on that label with a lot of teeny-bopper music.

GP: It was just sort of a part of their roster that maybe they were trying to fill in and I suddenly just find my way and carve a niche for myself on the label as a songwriter, as a collaborator with Disney films and, you know, getting to work with (filmmaker) Tim Burton, that’s all very cool, incredible opportunities that I absolutely never would have had if I wasn’t on their label. And I got to go to Disney a bunch, which is my favorite thing to do.

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Grace Potter, shown performing at 2015's Grand Point North festival, headlines both nights of this year's event at Waterfront Park.(Photo11: FREE PRESS FILE)

But the tradeoff was that they had a really tough time marketing me, especially because I’m an artist who, I’m mercurial and I change my mind a lot and I jump between genres with a distinct (expletive) you vibe (laughs), like, “You think you know what’s going on with me? That’s interesting. Go (expletive) yourself, watch what I’m gonna do now.”

BFP: There was a moment I realized you had transitioned from Norah Jones to Tina Turner.

GP: Right, that was a big one, that was a big moment. But I also think that I used to be very up in arms about those comparisons and now I’m looking at it as like, “OK, those are some incredibly powerful artists who have built a career around their singular voice” – they also are women – but I brushed against it and really bristled against just the fact that I was a female, having that be, like, the determining factor of anything.

But now with my career, I think I’m embracing the fact that I’m a woman and that there is an opportunity there for me to find a niche and not necessarily dig in my heels but just be more comfortable with what my voice does best. I’m a soulful singer that can bend in certain directions a little bit one way or a little bit another, but really at the center of it is soul music.

Crowds like this one in 2015 are likely to gather again when the Grand Point North festival takes place this weekend in Burlington.(Photo11: BRIAN JENKINS/for the FREE PRESS)

On this year’s festival

BFP: So will there be new material next weekend (at Grand Point North)?

GP: Yeah, I think so.

BFP: You did some new stuff last year.

GP: Yeah, and so the band will rehearse on Thursday and then we’ll kind of see where things land. We’ve got more guests and fun people than usual this year so there’s just a lot more to wrangle. I think the new music, it’s still pretty premature for me to be getting it out there, but it’s also, I love road-testing songs. It’s always my favorite way to make a song.

BFP: So can you talk about any of the guests who will be joining you?

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Jackson Browne, shown performing in 2009 at the Shelburne Museum, will play Sept. 15 at the Grand Point North festival in Burlington.(Photo11: RYAN MERCER/FREE PRESS FILE)

GP: I would say that it’s safe to say that Jackson Browne is going to – I think the Jackson thing, I certainly want it to be a surprise, but you could always hint….

BFP: That he will be joining you or you will be joining him, one of those?

GP: Yeah, one of those things will happen. There will be a collaboration between us for sure. And there’s just a lot of other fun things this year.

It was very important for me also to have the female representation be not just females because they’re females. I have this really strong feeling that the backlash of the #MeToo movement is that women are just gonna think that they can saunter in and be this kind of, “All right, now I belong here because I didn’t before.” What I find now is the opposite is happening. Women are not resting on their laurels of being a woman, they’re like “Excellence is what gets me where I need to be.”

BFP: “And now maybe the door is open more for me to bring that through.”

GP: The (expletive) sinks and the cream rises to the top. The (expletive) has now been identified and cast aside. It just makes so much more room. It’s created so much more headroom for excellence, because we’re not bogging through it. And the work is not done – there’s a lot of work to do – but as a person, as a female who’s been throwing a music festival for eight years, it never occurred to me before that maybe I was skimping on the female representation.

On her next record

BFP: So at next year’s festival you could be promoting a new album.

GP: I will be. I would be disappointed if it didn’t come out before Grand Point North. One thing I’m learning about life is I can’t rush things any more. Rushing things is what makes people get sloppy and it’s what makes decisions fall to the wayside and you’re just kind of in survival mode, and I don’t want to do that. So if it’s not ready then so be it. But I just have a feeling it will be.

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.

Grace Potter performs during day two of the Grand Point North music festival on Saturday September 18, 2016 on the waterfront in Burlington. She brings her festival back to Waterfront Park this weekend. BRIAN JENKINS/FREE PRESS FILE

Kat Wright and the Indomitable Soul Band performs during day one of the Grand Point North music festival on Saturday September 17, 2016 on the waterfront in Burlington. (BRIAN JENKINS/for the FREE PRESS)

Eliza Hardy Jones, a member of Grace Potter's band, performs a solo show during day two of the Grand Point North music festival on Sunday, September 18, 2016 on the waterfront in Burlington. BRIAN JENKINS/for the FREE PRESS